Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
TLDR: “Interesting, but has little to do with zines”
This book is not about zines. (A “zine” is an amateur, home-published “magazine”). The subtitle is key here: this is about the culture of zines.
It’s not a how-to. It will not teach you how about make or distribute zines. It’s really about the people who make them, and why they do it.
The author is an NYU professor who studies underground, predominately Left-leaning, activist culture. This is the culture, it turns out, that most readily adopts the zine as a means of social or political outlet.
The primary cultural force is anger and ostracism. Zine publishers feel like they’re on the outside of society, and most of them prefer it that way. It’s become a trope in zine culture to make fun of the bourgeoisie. The book goes deep into why this is popular.
The best chapter is towards the end, when the author subversively calls out this culture by saying, “If not ‘normal’ society, then what?” The underground culture is all about tearing down the norms of society, but is very short of answers on what to replace it with. Like most movements, it’s big on revolution, but falls short on the post-revolutionary plan.
Weirdly, he spends very little time discussing the Internet (this is the fourth edition of the book, which was first published in 1997; this edition is from 2025). I wasn’t sure why this was – it would seem that the Internet would merit some discussion, especially since it’s likely taken over the publishing role that zines provided in the first place.
In this same vein, I thought the book was also strong when it compared the initiative of publishing a zine to the “pamphleteers” of hundreds of years ago. Back in the say, the only way to get your message out to a wide group of people would be to publish a pamphlet and distribute it (Common Sense being the most obvious example).
Back before the Internet, that was about it. You codified your ideas on paper, mass produced it, and distributed it. There was significant…power, in this? To me, that’s the neat thing about zines, and the Internet kind of sublimated that. When there’s no effort required to publish an idea, that friction or barrier to entry is removed as a filtering mechanism, and we get pretty much what we have now.
Book Info
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A softcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.